A Moment
by plot-what-plot
Summary: Sherlock has been missing for six days. Naturally, Joan is the one who finds him. Takes place after the finale, can be Joanlock or just friendship, depending on how you look at it.


_"We are not having a moment."_

* * *

Sherlock has been missing for six days.

Naturally, Joan is the one who finds him. She calls the police as soon as she is _certain_ that this is where Sherlock has been taken, and Gregson doesn't doubt her instincts or her deductions for a second.

"_Stay there," _Gregson's voice responds over the phone. _"We'll be there in five minutes tops."_

And, standing in front of an old warehouse made up almost entirely of graffiti covered walls and boarded up windows, clutching her cell phone in one hand as she anxiously bites her thumbnail on the other, she even debates listening to Gregson.

Well, she gives it a _bit_ of thought, anyway.

But then a group of men bolt out of the building through a massive garage door that must have once been used for semi-trucks to unload cargo, back when this place was still functional. The men—three of them, none bothering to hide their faces, one of them with a nasty scar across his left eye—drive out of the building in an SUV with the windows down, none of them noticing Joan as she makes a considerable effort to hide her face and come off as a neutral, innocent passerby. One of the men leans out the window, and to Joan's absolute sinking dread, he lights a Molotov cocktail and throws it into one of the only unboarded windows in the whole building.

She doesn't have much of a choice after that.

Now the heat is just about unbearable to the point that she is almost certain she can feel the skin on her arms searing like a bad sunburn, but Joan keeps running. Besides, the fire is not so much the problem, she thinks as she sprints through the abandoned warehouse with her nose tucked into the crook of her arm; the problem is the smoke. She can feel it stinging her eyes, clawing its way into her throat and poisoning her lungs.

A voice in the back of her head is saying that it might have been easier, might have been a little bit _smarter_, to have dialed 911 for the fire department first, but that thought is barely a blip on her radar in comparison to everything else.

_Have to find Sherlock, _she thinks, but she grants, _okay, have to survive this place, and _then_ I have to find Sherlock._

She follows the clues. The men exited through the garage doors, and from there the only place that looks like it's been used is the door at the opposite end of the first floor. She dodges a falling piece of drywall, and it explodes on the concrete floor in a burst of sparks, just inches from her feet.

Not for the first time, she thanks God that she is still in her jogging outfit, and she bursts through the door, finding herself at the foot of a staircase.

Joan curses under her breath. Going up is always a bad idea when fire is involved.

She jogs up the stairs two at a time.

"Sherlock!" she cries as she reaches the top of the stairs, but now the fire is _really_ getting started, and the crackle of burning wood drowns out her voice. Or maybe it's the smoke in her lungs making her voice sound so frighteningly small, but Joan does not dwell on that.

Though her sprint is slower now—she has to avoid stepping on the weakened floor too forcefully now, lest she fall through and into the floor below—she continues down the hall to the only closed door at the very end of it.

She glances into each room as she passes, but there is nothing in any of them, nothing that matters. A few boxes here, an overturned filing cabinet there.

She keeps moving until she reaches the door at the end of the hall, and she tries the doorknob.

Naturally, the doorknob remains firmly in place, and Joan makes the split second decision to throw her entire body against the door.

It is a poor decision. She cries out and stumbles backward, shoulder throbbing, and she curses out loud. With a determined glare at the door, though, she shoves the pain into the back of her mind. She drives her left heel into the floor, lifts up her right leg, and delivers a swift, powerful kick to the door right beside the doorknob.

_Well, at least the fire is good for one thing, _she thinks.

The door gives almost no resistance. It swings open with a crunch as a small section of the doorframe breaks, and Joan hurls herself into the room.

And there he is.

"Sherlock," she breathes, half in relief and half in disbelief that she has actually _found _him.

There is a pipe running along the opposite wall, from floor to ceiling, and Sherlock is sitting against it with his legs sprawled out in front of him. His arms are twisted unnaturally behind his back, and Joan realizes a second later that it's because his wrists are restrained behind that pipe.

His head is hanging down, his chin resting against his chest, and he does not look up or even move upon her entrance.

She stumbles across the room and hastily kneels down in front of him, gets herself at his eye level, and she has the most absurd urge to hug him. She doesn't, because really, she doesn't have the time. Since his wrists are not quite within a convenient distance she feels his neck for a pulse. He's warm, almost feverishly warm, but his pulse is normal. Without a moment's hesitation she pulls the Swiss Army knife out of the pocket of her sweat jacket—for once glad that she had listened to Sherlock and started carrying that thing around, ironically, for _her_ safety—and reaches around him to get at his wrists. A zip tie binds his wrists together, digging into the flesh in a way that makes Joan wince, but a quick cut with the pocketknife has his arms free.

He slumps forward almost immediately, but she catches him. She grabs Sherlock's face in both of her hands and forces him to look at her.

His eyes are half open. There is dried blood caked on his face, some clearly from a bloody nose that was never cleaned up, some from a cut across his cheek. Anger boils at the pit of her stomach, but she ignores it.

"Sherlock, can you hear me?"

He gives no answer, but his eyes are on her, however hazily.

"If you can hear me, I need you to try to move," she tells him sternly. "We need to get out of here, and I can't carry you."

Sherlock blinks slowly, and his eyes begin to grow even more distant.

She gives him a quick pat on the cheek. "Hey, don't pass out on me," she orders. "Come on. Stand up."

Joan grabs a hold of his arm and begins to tug him upward, gently at first, and he barely responds. So she drapes his arm across her shoulders and really pulls, dragging him upward with her.

"That's it," she tells him, and his feet manage to find the floor. "One step at a time. Come on."

She can hear fire sirens.

They make their way out of the room, slowly at first, but then Joan hears some distant part of the building collapse with a muffled crack and series of thuds. She knows they need to pick up the pace a bit, but the second she tries to do so, Sherlock lets out a pained cry. All of his weight is on her a second later, and she falls to her knees in the doorway as he falls against her.

"Sherlock?" she asks, and she turns him around so that his back is against the doorframe. "Sherlock, what happened?"

She can see more blood now, not on his face but on his shirt. It is a huge stain just over his ribs on the right side, and Joan wonders how on Earth she missed that the first time. She lifts up his shirt to see the wound, and despite the pressing situation, she does it slowly.

The open gash spans from the bottom of his sternum nearly all the way up to the top of his right shoulder. There _were_ stitches holding the wound shut—poorly applied stitches, but stitches nonetheless—but moving Sherlock had broken nearly all of them. Joan doesn't think about the fact that his kidnappers stitched up a wound just to keep him alive, nor does she let herself imagine the kind of things they might have done to him in the time they bought themselves; instead she sheds off her sweat jacket, leaving her in her tank top and sweatpants (which _still_ feels like too much in this suffocating heat), and she wraps the jacket around his torso. One jacket sleeve under his left arm, one over his right shoulder, and she reaches around him and ties the sleeves in a knot behind his back.

It's not enough, but stopping the bleeding is really all she can do with what she has.

More distressing than that, though, is that she can't move Sherlock when he's in his state. That wound is certainly enough to kill him, and moving Sherlock again might very well be all it takes to cause him to bleed out.

She coughs. This smoke is getting to be too much.

Part of the wall out in the hallway gives way to the fire and crumbles to the floor, and the sparks fly up into the air. Joan focuses on pressing her jacket against Sherlock's chest and ignoring his half-conscious protests, but she lets out a short scream when the ceiling in the room they've just left collapses down and showers the floor in burning debris.

Then some of the floor out in the hallway follows suit.

All that work to find him, all that worrying for six days, all that investigating on her own even when Sherlock himself had said before that solving a case that hits so close to home could be dangerous… She said to hell with that, she solved the case, and she found him.

And now she might be dying for her troubles.

"Damn it, Sherlock."

It's his stupid fault for being kidnapped in the first place; she _told_ him not to get involved with these people. She _told_ him that Moriarty still had loyal employees, employees that would be more than a little ticked off at them for sending their boss to prison. And she _told_ him that the case he was working had Moriarty's stench all over it.

_But you just had to investigate, didn't you?_

She keeps the pressure on his wound and looks at him, waiting for his eyes to open, which they don't, and she bites the inside of her cheek.

_Of course you did._

And it's then, just when that thought crosses her mind, that she hears voices. There are men on the floor below them, shouting back and forth, but what they're actually saying is just about drowned out by the crackling of the fire.

"JOAN?"

That was Gregson's voice, and Joan's eyes widen. "Up here!" she shouts, "We're upstairs!"

Boots stomp up the staircase, and seconds later there are four firemen, completely decked out in their fire safety gear, carefully making their way across the parts of the hallway that are still intact.

"Be careful!" Joan has to shout even though the firemen are right beside her now, as one of them bends over to grab Sherlock. "He's badly hurt, bleeding heavily, on his right side."

The man nods, signals to one of the others, and the two of them carefully move Sherlock so that he can be carried. Joan coughs again, and she realizes that she's beginning to feel a bit light-headed.

"He'll need… an ambulance," she chokes out, and she tries to stand up.

She stumbles almost immediately, and black dots burst in her vision.

One of the firemen not attending to Sherlock holds her steady, and he begins to lead her down the hallway.

But Joan's vision goes black, and the last thing she hears before she loses consciousness is:

"We're gonna need two stretchers!"

* * *

She wakes up, six hours later, in a hospital.

They tell her that she's fine—the smoke inhalation was minimal, luckily—but they advise her to get plenty of rest and to drink plenty of water. She nods, asks them where Sherlock is.

They won't let her see him.

Well, they'll let her _see_ him, but from outside his hospital room only, through a plate of glass.

They need to figure out the extent of his trauma before he sees anyone, determine how he is dealing psychologically, they tell her. His kidnappers used a variety of torture tactics, it seems, and they want to have a therapist speak with him before he sees anyone.

And even though Joan knows, she _knows_ they know what they're talking about, and hell, she would have suggested this exact course of action for her own patient if she were his doctor… She can't listen. This is not some patient, this is _Sherlock_, and while she doesn't know what he's been through this past week, but she can guess.

She needs to see him. She needs him to see _her._

She doesn't voice her objections. She changes back into her dirty, burnt tank top and sweatpants—anything is better than a hospital gown—and they lead her to the hallway outside his hospital room. Bell is already there, supposedly because both she and Sherlock are under protective custody, and Joan has to admit she is glad to see him. He offers her a quick smile.

Joan smiles back, but then she crosses her arms over her chest and looks into Sherlock's room.

He's awake. He has adjusted the bed so that he can sit up, but he doesn't look like he is in any shape to be getting up any time soon. There is an ace bandage wrapped around his chest, and Joan can see multiple stitches on his arms and his shoulders.

He is staring at the window, his head turned away from them.

Joan glances around—at Bell, at the two nurses—and without warning she breaks into a run and pushes herself through the door into the hospital room, ignoring the nurses' frightened shouts and attempts to grab onto her and hold her back. Bell, on the other hand, simply steps out of the way and lets her through.

"Sherlock?"

His wide eyes are on her the second the door opens, and the two nurses following behind her freeze in their tracks.

Sherlock opens his mouth, looks like he wants to say something, but the words don't come. And Joan doesn't care. In three steps she has crossed the space between them and sat down on his bed, and she reaches forward and—carefully, gently—finally gives in to her urge to hug him.

She wraps her arms around him, purposely avoiding the worst of his injuries, with one arm behind his lower back and the other around his shoulder. She brings up her hand to the back of his head and holds him there.

It takes a moment, but his tense muscles begin to relax, and he lets out a barely audible breath as he drops his head down onto her shoulder. She feels his forearms against her back, and she can even feel one of his fists clenching around a section of her shirt. Sherlock takes in a slow and slightly shaky breath, and as he lets it out, she feels him tuck his head further down into the dip of her shoulder and tighten his hold on her.

"Watson," he whispers, if it can even be called that—it is so quiet that she would never have heard it had they not been so close.

Still, she hears it loud and clear. His voice is full of emotions that she has seen in him before, here and there, but never all at once. It's full of sadness and anger and just the tiniest twinge of fear and, above all, relief.

She is just so glad he's alright.

"If you weren't already in a hospital bed," she murmurs, shaking her head. "I _swear._"

Sherlock lets out a huff, a little monosyllabic chuckle. He gives a minute nod against her shoulder.

"I've missed you, too, Watson."

* * *

[Author's note:]

I saw a tumblr post after the finale by user fundamentally-people, saying something like "I still haven't gotten a Joan and Sherlock hug," and I could not agree more that this needs to be fixed. Thus, I felt the need to write this. I may or may not write this again from Sherlock's point of view if I ever get around to it. For now though, this is just a oneshot. Thanks for reading!


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